2. Philosophy - Stefano Franchi

F ROM LANGUAGE TO MYTH
It means that, in order to complete the double relationship prescribed by the canonical
formula, one needs to find a double congruence that relates, on the one hand, the woman
and the bird with respect with jealousy and, on the other, a bird with pottery. Lévi-Strauss
is indeed able to find a bird, the Ovenbird common in North America and in North Amer-
ican myths, that fulfills this congruence. The Ovenbird is a “reversed” Goatsucker since it
is a diurnal animal (vs. the nocturnal features of its opposite), it carefully builds a nest
whereas the Goatsucker its the eggs on the ground, and it sings joyfully instead of emitting
a sad, repetitive cry. The mythographer’s task, therefore, becomes to investigate the fea-
tures of this bird as it appears in mythology, and to find out whether the Ovenbird myths
can be interpreted as reversed Goatsucker myths. Or, in other words, whether the myths in
which the Ovenbird appears can be considered as “variants” of the Jivaro myth from which
the analysis started.
The answer, as expected, is indeed positive and the analysis of North American my-
thology brings forth a rich material confirming what Lévi-Strauss calls his “transcendental
deduction,” i.e. the deduction of a missing link in the logical organization of the mythic ma-
terial conducted solely according to theoretical considerations. Lévi-Strauss follows the
transformations from one myth to another across the two continents, and is eventually able
to reconstruct, after several applications of the canonical formula, a double series of oppo-
sitions organized along the axis container/contained that is actualized in the myth as fol-
lows:
Potter’s clay undergoes extraction from the earth, then modeling, and then
firing to become a container designed to receive a content: food. Food itself
undergoes the same treatment, but in reverse: it is first placed in a clay container,
then cooked, then processed in the body through the operation of digestion,
and finally is ejected in the shape of excrement:
clay → extraction → modeling → firing → container
excrement ← ejection ← digestion ← cooking ← food 21
21. Claude Lévi-Strauss, La potière jalouse…, 232; Engl tr. 175.
233